My Approach
Cooking engages all our our senses. You have to use your eyes and ears, your nose and tongue, but especially your hands. There is so much that we know that we don’t know we know, and therefore cannot “tell” someone else. This “tacit knowledge” is exchanged by experiencing something together with all of our senses, not just talking and listening.
I try to remember this when I go to a cooking class. I try to be open to both what the chef is saying as well as what she is conveying through gesture, and to work on the food with my hands as she is working on it with hers. We are each of us like icebergs, with the top of the iceberg above the surface what we know we know, and the larger part of the iceberg below the surface what we don’t know we know. Most learning comes of circumstances where the bottoms of our icebergs can bump into each other.
So how to exchange tacit knowledge through a blog? Good question. A lot of pictures, to start. Maybe in the back and forth of comments and questions. Not sure. But I know that cooking especially is something you learn by doing. So if you are intrigued by one of my blogs, go make it. Whenever I go to a cooking class, I buy the all of ingredients the next day and try to reprise what I think I learned. And in that attempt, and the many trials and errors to follow, is where the real learning begins. Happy cooking and eating!